Martha Gayoye just might hold the record for the quickest Collaborative Research Network co-chair appointment in LSA history. She first engaged with LSA as a virtual Early Career and Graduate Student Workshop attendee in 2021, but wasn’t able to attend a conference in person until 2025 in Chicago.
“I flew in the night before the day I was presenting, and then I flew out the day after,” the Keele University Senior Lecturer recalls. “Very bad idea, I would not recommend to anyone. I was so exhausted I remember presenting and saying to everyone, ‘I haven’t had any sleep, so please forgive me if I don’t sound very coherent.’”
Despite her concerns, Dr. Gayoye clearly was able to get her points across—her presentation left enough of an impression to prompt fellow attendees to email her with their comments, as well as requests for her comments on their work. Clearly, CRN 13: African Law and Society left a strong impression on her as well, one that prompted her to get involved with the group as fully as possible. During her brief appearance, she met CRN co-chairs Sindiso MnisiWeeks and Olanike Adelakun, as well as Nkatha Kabira, who would go on to replace the former as a CRN leader. This was particularly exciting for Professor Gagyoye, who cites Professor MnisiWeeks’ recent book, Alter-Native Constitutionalism: Commoning ‘Common’ Law, Transforming Property in South Africa, as a “gamechanger” for her own research.
“I felt like people were really interested in what I had to say at the CRN,” she continues. “I think the CRN offers genuine and organic space for interactions, both in and outside the conference…Sindiso is really intellectual about African law and society, so I think her and others in the CRN will be really good to look up to. I look forward to continuing our conversations.”
Professor Adelakun, Associate Professor and Acting Dean of Law at Lead City University, understands the value of such conversations, especially with scholars familiar with the African context. She credits LSA, and particularly the Graduate Student and Early Career Workshop, as well as the Legal Pluralism CRN workshop that took place before the 2022 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, with helping her expand beyond her doctrinal background to embrace a more multidisciplinary, multi-faceted approach to her work, which focuses on reproductive health law, conflict studies, bioethics, and gender-based violence.
“For me it’s the power of the CRN. We underestimate…how much information and ideas we can get by bringing people with similar lived experiences together to talk about their experiences,” she shares. “That has been the most surprising thing in my academic career.”
One such conversation, at a panel held by CRN 47: Economic and Social Rights, focused on a topic specific to Africa, prompting Professor Adelakun to realize the need for more such discussions. After all, LSA is full of scholars, African and non-African, whose work focuses on issues unique to the continent, but their diverse research areas and disciplinary backgrounds often made it challenging for them to find one another. When she discovered that her associates, Professors Jonathan Klaaren and Wahab Egbewole, had started the preliminary steps of creating a CRN specifically for exploring African issues in relation to law and society, they joined forces to make it a reality.
Today, CRN 13 holds panels at every Annual Meeting, which are supplemented by group dinners, informal hangouts, and even a custom T-shirt one year. Members communicate frequently via their listserv and on WhatsApp, sharing professional opportunities, trading feedback on one another’s work, and oscillating freely between deep conversation and jokes and pranks. Many close friendships have developed over the years. Even Dr. Gayoye’s one-day LSA appearance sparked meaningful connections, including with one scholar who plans to visit her during a visiting fellowship in England.
One of CRN 13’s major priorities is centering African scholars when it comes to telling African stories. Growing up in Africa is not a necessary prerequisite to producing meaningful scholarship on the region, but it does provide an innate cultural and social understanding that cannot be replicated by those with different origins. For this reason, CRN 13 leaders are intent on ensuring that, while researchers of all backgrounds are welcome, African scholars set the agenda—an unfortunately rare dynamic in a space where white, Western voices are often amplified by default.
“Obviously you have Africans who do research on Africa, but you also have non-African scholars…for a long time there’s been a sense that the agenda on Africa has been driven by non-African scholars…its not just about doing fieldwork and coming back and writing your findings for a Western institution, its also about knowing and understanding the context. Law and society is about law in context, and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to write about people you don’t understand,” Dr. Gayoye explains.
One example of a concept that centers Western perspectives is methodological individualism, which analyzes social phenomena through the lens of individual choice, freedom, and agency. International and indigenous scholars, Dr. Gayoye says, are problematizing that viewpoint.
“The extent to which we have choice really depends on your context,” she says, mentioning issues such as abortion and rules regarding personal appearance. “That has really shifted my work around women judges in Africa. It has shaped my agenda and the way I see the collective agency of women judges, or any subject in the African context, or even in the Indigenous peoples’ context. A person is not one individual, a person is many people…it goes back to what we were saying before, about who writes the stories on Africa. It’s about understanding that even the way we think about people, the way we think about ourselves, is very much shaped by culture, by context.”
Dr. Gayoye first encountered the concept of “law in context” during her Ph.D. program at the University of Warwick, one of several UK universities to champion the concept. Prior to academia, she practiced law in Kenya for several years before going to the University of Warwick in 2009 to get her LLM in International Development Law and Human Rights. Once she completed her studies, she returned to Kenya to work for a government institution. The ensuing six years were marked by anger and a growing sense of helplessness as she learned firsthand how material realities can render law ineffective at addressing existential challenges like unemployment, poverty, and corruption. This prompted her return to Warwick and continues to inspire her work on African governance, constitutionalism, and gender.
Professor Adelakun’s work also comes from a personal place. In Nigeria, she was fortunate to grow up with a father who prized education, as well as a wonderful high school teacher who reinforced that value within her. But growing up surrounded by peers who didn’t have the same opportunities, in a culture with rigid attitudes about gender and permissive attitudes about sexual harassment at school and in the workplace, motivated her to explore law’s potential as a tool for protecting women and children.
By centering African voices, CRN 13 honors the value of Dr. Gayoye and Professor Adelakun’s experiences in producing meaningful scholarship on Africa. It has also become a refuge for those traditionally treated as outsiders in the academy. Both professors use the word “belonging” multiple times to describe their experiences in the CRN.
“LSA, and particularly the CRN, has really offered me a place of solace,” says Professor Adelakun, getting emotional. “When you’re surrounded by people that actually care and understand you, that don’t judge you…you’re so free.”
This speaks to what truly makes CRN 13 so special for its African members. Academia can be an emotionally challenging world to navigate, with its own, often unspoken, cultural norms and complex social dynamics. These challenges are amplified for scholars who often find themselves in rooms where default assumptions about the world are fundamentally different from their own experiences. Even in diverse, welcoming spaces like LSA, where people are generally interested in learning about different perspectives, there is nothing quite like talking to someone who immediately understands what you are saying, who you can riff with, who sees you in a way no one else can.
“You don’t have to watch what you say or what you do because you feel, ‘these are my people who understand me,’” Professor Adelakun continues. “So believe me, every LSA is something to look forward to, just for that reason.
“I have a place. I belong here.”